I remember my first biennial six years ago. It was the first week of my first year at university, my first week in Istanbul and my first activity with a now-very-close-friend of mine. I remember that despite the newborn cluelessness, it all came easy to me, and nothing in the city or the exhibition surprised me. (advantages of a comprehensive prior education and a speedy adaptation...)
Concept of this year is "What keeps mankind alive?"
This is my third biennial since then and is by far the best one. Only %50 of it is crap.
And you might ask: what gives anyone the right to call an art piece crap if the artist is content with the end result? Well, the act of exhibiting does. Moreover, %50 is actually a very good ratio when it comes to creating. Being quite agnostic about art, I will be talking about the crap half with people who defend the whole thing and I'll be talking about the astonishing half with people who defy it all together. The definition of art is just too broad to have a single approach to it; but I strongly recommend that you see Biennial 09 and enrich your gestalt. Ah, and stop by the Alexander Berg portraits in Taksim metro station, there's something extremely captivating about them.
